The joy of an industrial age organization is that we separated the doers from the deciders. If you were a decider (also known as a boss, leader, white-collar, salaried person) then you made decisions for what the doers (also know as followers, blue-collar, hourly person) ought to do. Since the workforce was not involved in...
From Boeing (737MAX, 787 rollout) to NASA (Columbia, Challenger), we’ve seen disastrous examples of how bad news from people low in the hierarchy gets distorted as it moves to the top of the organization. The distortion is consistently in one direction: it mitigates the bad news, making it sound less severe and less likely than...
Q: What is a major barrier that keeps people from speaking up? A: We call it the power gradient, it’s how much more important your boss is than you. It affects you like this – you don’t speak up against the boss. Information flows inversely proportional to the power gradient, so the steeper...
The power gradient is the amount of social distance there is between one person and another. The power gradient is the feeling of “how much more important are people in the next tier in the hierarchy than we are” and “how much more important are we then people below us.” In Industrial Age organizations (where...
Q: Why do we need emotions at work? A: In the Industrial Age, I didn’t need my workforce to make decisions. I made the decisions for them. Now, we want the doers to also be the deciders and we say “you’re going to be part of the decision making apparatus.” It turns out you...
In the last six weeks of the IBL blog, we have compared the old plays of the Industrial Age playbook to the new playbook for leaders found in Leadership Is Language. Here’s a recap. First, we have two different work modes. Redwork is the active production work that benefits from reducing variability and a prove...
This is part 4 of 4 of the ABCs of Cultural Change. The senior executives argued that any initiative that was not reflected in the company’s performance evaluation system wouldn’t stick. They called it accountability. Based on Aubrey Daniels’ book, Bringing out the Best in People, we agreed and felt that the word “consequence” was a better fit....
Continued from the post titled The ABCs of a High Performing Leader-Leader Organization Modules completed. Vision Statement written. Values Instilled. The training is over…and… Nothing changes. Sound familiar? We spent time working individually focusing on one avatar at a time defining behaviors for each group. The team worked together to develop each behavior into an action, something...
Continued from the ABCs of culture change post. This is the step you will want to skip, we almost did. As we sat with the learning and development team our creative juices began to flow. Each idea like a dart flew one after another, we were unstoppable. The to do lists began to grow and...
The ABCs of a high performing leader-leader organization. The learning and development team for a major manufacturing team conducted a brainstorming session to build a scalable course for implementing leader-leader behaviors throughout their organization. We were able to sit in and assist in their process. The process boiled down to ABC – avatars, behaviors, and...
